Fast directory conversion to file

Question

I have a directory D that contains multiple files and folders and consumes a very large amount of disk space. Although I do not care much about disk space consumption, I want to convert D into a file as fast as possible. The first approach that came to mind was to use a compression tool however it is taking too long to finish.

Is there a faster way?

Thank you for your help.

Answer 1

you can use tar command, with no compression

with tar -cf you can convert your folder to a file, with no compression process.

tar -cf your_big_folder.tar /path/to/your/big/folder

and finally you can convert it back to folder with

tar -xf your_big_folder.tar